Progressive Disease Meant Carrying a Vodka Bottle in My Briefcase to the Office Men’s Room – Bob P.
About This Speaker Tape
Bob P., a longtime AA member who works at the General Service Office in New York, shares his story at a winter conference in Winnipeg, Manitoba in January 1984. He opens with warm memories of a beloved Canadian AA member named Mac, recounting a dinner in Helsinki at a World Service Meeting where Mac leaned across the table and said, "My sponsor never told me that Alcoholics Anonymous would be like this." Bob then tells the moving story of Johnny O., a young Marine who sobered up at Camp Lejeune, was deployed to Beirut, and wrote to GSO asking for resources to start AA among the Marines there. Johnny's letters, signed with names like "Bewildered in Beirut" and "Bothered in Beirut," became cherished at the office — until his name appeared on the casualty list after the 1983 barracks bombing. Bob reveals that Johnny's brother and brother-in-law are in the audience, and that a civilian AA group Johnny helped start carried on in Lebanon after his death.
Bob describes growing up as a shy, introverted only child in Kansas, moving every year because of his father's Depression-era work, and retreating into a fantasy world of books and movies. He dreamed of sophisticated New York life — Fred Astaire crossing Central Park — and carried impossibly high expectations of himself into adulthood. After college, where he sold an article to a national magazine, he moved to New York to become a writer and immediately became a daily drinker at age 21, joining older colleagues for after-work martinis. For 33 years he worked at the same large company, his drinking progressing from social cocktails to round-the-clock vodka consumption.
His physical deterioration was severe: liver damage, uncontrollable shaking, massive nosebleeds from impaired blood clotting, constant vomiting, and terrible weakness. He carried a vodka bottle in a briefcase and drank in office restrooms. After a massive esophageal hemorrhage in Chicago where he lost half his blood, he was told he would die if he drank again. He quit for ten months on willpower alone, then his doctor said "one won't hurt you" — and within weeks he was drinking worse than before. A second hemorrhage nearly killed him, with a code 500 called. His doctor gave up on him and sent him to a psychiatrist who turned out to be Dr. Harry Tiebout, a non-alcoholic trustee of AA's General Service Board. Tiebout told Bob he could not help him and connected him with Stew Jones, who became his sponsor.
Bob's bottom came on July 3, 1961, at a Fourth of July fireworks display in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, where he stumbled drunk through crowds while explosions lit up angry faces staring at him — a scene he compares to Dante's Inferno. Sitting on a curb crying, the First Step hit him: his life was unmanageable. He went to High Watch Farm, a purely AA-based recovery facility, and for the first time in his life realized it might be possible to live happily without alcohol. Now nearly 23 years sober, he runs every morning as his Eleventh Step practice, skis, sails, and marvels at how AA members get younger with time. He closes with the insight he heard at his first out-of-town meeting in Houston: AA does not teach us how to handle our drinking — it teaches us how to handle sobriety, which is the thing we could never handle in the first place.
Discussion
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